V-Vehicle to Build Cars in Louisiana

A new car company with backing from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens intends to manufacture fuel-efficient cars in Louisiana, at the site of a closed General Motors auto supplier's plant. V-Vehicle Company said it will approximately double the size of the facility and hire more than 1,400 workers to produce a "high-quality, environmentally friendly and fuel-efficient car for the U.S. market," according to a press release issued this morning.

That's about all the information the company is willing to release at this time, though there's speculation the car will be powered only by gasoline and that it won't be a hybrid, full-electric or other alternative-powered vehicle.

"We're not prepared to talk about the product yet," VVC spokesman Joe Fisher told Cars.com this afternoon. "But V-Vehicle believes the new car will reconstruct the entire automobile [manufacturing and sales] process from beginning to end to provide extra value to customers."

Fisher says the "V" in V-Vehicle Company stood for value when the company was founded in 2006 by CEO Frank Varasano. Varasano graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy before serving as a nuclear engineer aboard atomic submarines. After serving in the U.S. Navy, Varasano got an MBA from Harvard.

The company has been operating in stealth development mode for the past two years
since receiving venture funding from Kleiner Perkins and other
investors.

I feel so sorry for folks in Louisiana who are falling for this scam, Governor Jindal included. Al Gore's involvement, coupled with the lack of available information on the company tells me that it's a big shell, designed to suck up "green" grants from the Obama regime.
We've seen this type of game before: The principals will draw a hefty paycheck for a couple of years (funded by "investors", ie: little old ladies whose pensions are managed by professional fund managers), the State of Louisiana will throw some tax concessions at them and then the whole thing will quietly disappear, leaving the "investors" holding the bag.

boy, you guys are a bunch of optimists. someone tries to do something new and bold and you sit on the sidelines and belittle them with "algore" and "baroke" cracks. someone is out there busting their ass to actually do something and the only words you can utter are negative. you should support industry in this country and support innovation and support someone trying to revitalize manufacturing and energy efficiency instead of being such assh*les and mocking everything.

Kevin, we DO support people who are "out there busting their ass to actually do something" all we ask is that you show us what has been done.

You can't run in "stelth mode" if you're getting patents on things that are "new and bold". Patents are public records so if this company had anything TRULY innovative, you'd see it on the cover of Popular Science, Motor Trend and WIRED magazines.

Running a shell company to suck up taxpayer money is not goin to "revitalize manufacturing and enery efficiency" any more than Enron did, it's only going to damage the few manufacturers who have managed to survive thus far.

This will be either hydrogen or natural gas powered. With Boone Pickens involved, my bet is firmly on the latter. But one thing is absolutely certain: as soon as the company becomes unionized, it signs its own death warrant on the spot! It will self-destruct the moment the unions get a foot in the door - that is the ONLY reason that all of Detroit is destroyed today! But I don't expect them to learn this lesson ever.

This isn't a case of reinventing the wheel. The technology is already out there to build a fuel-efficient gasoline-powered car.

All they have to do is build a car body similar to Toyota's 1/X concept, fit it with an efficient 4-cylinder (or 3-cylinder due to low weight?) gasoline engine, and you would have a car that got pretty phenomenal gas mileage without requiring a hybrid drive train.

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